Occupational stress as a mediator between organisational intelligence traits and digital government service quality: a triangulation design approach

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to examine the mediating role of occupational stress in addressing the missing link between organisational intelligence (OI) traits and digital government service quality and propose relevant strategies in sustaining the digital government service quality whilst enhancing the psychological well-being of the service providers.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper utilises a triangulation design approach to interpret the findings of the study and propose pertinent strategies. Firstly, we examined the mediating role of occupational stress in addressing the link between OI traits, and digital government service quality. Next, we examined the priority factors of OI traits and occupational stress to sustain the quality of digital government services via the Importance-Performance Map Analysis (IPMA). These findings were cross-examined with the code’s percentage generated from participants’ open-ended survey feedback on aspects that requires improvement in sustaining service quality.

Findings

In principle, occupational stress mediates the relationship between OI traits at the third-order component level and digital service quality. Analysis at the lower component level shows that the mediation effect of occupational stress is only significant in the presence of employee-oriented OI traits and “Alignment and Congruence”. Accordingly, the IPMA exhibited the importance of “Job engagement”, “Alignment and Congruence” and “Occupational Stress” in sustaining service quality. Conversely, code’s percentage analysis demonstrated the role of other insignificant traits such as “Leadership” and Appetite for Change and Knowledge Deployment’ in ensuring the sustainability of digital service quality.

Originality/value

By integrating the Organisational Model of Stress with Public Service-Dominant Logic, this paper rejuvenates the stressors utilised in a traditional work setup and widens the perspective of individual job performance to organisational level performance, to reflect the context of today’s public service delivery. We triangulated the outcome from mediation analysis, IPMA as well as open-ended feedback analysis and propose prioritisation on the aspects of “Employee-oriented traits”, “Psychological Well-being”, “Alignment and Congruence”, “Leadership” and “Appetite for Change and Knowledge Deployment” aspects for sustaining digital government service quality. Considering the significance of occupational stress in sustaining service quality in both quantitative and qualitative analysis, this paper also takes the approach of proposing a stress intervention program at the individual and organisational levels to manage the psychological well-being of the service providers.

Citation

Ramakrishnan, S., Mutum, D.S., Chit, M.M. and Wong, M.S. (2024), "Occupational stress as a mediator between organisational intelligence traits and digital government service quality: a triangulation design approach", Journal of Service Theory and Practice, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSTP-02-2023-0041